This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse

Recapping a book doesn’t quite work for a book of poetry; I need a new method. Ada Limón gives us layered poems stacked into a story, filled with snow globes and hardware stores, a troubled marriage, letters to Ronald Reagan. Her four characters are the hero, his soon-to-be-estranged wife, the woman at the hardware store he has a crush on, and his friend Lewis who writes those notes to Reagan. Each poem can be taken separately, exists in its own universe of a page. But they press together to tell the story of a lonely man whose wife leaves him and he eventually finds happiness at the hardware store. Limón chooses epigraphs from Hamlet (“What a piece of work is man?”), Letters to Wendy’s, and song lyrics. All of the poems sparkle, but if I had to pick a favorite part it’d be the end of The Hardware Lady Repeats Herself where she asks a customer Will that be all? “and the woman nods, but seems not to have heard hear, so again, Will that be all? Then nothing, as if together, they had already answered this question one thousand times and finally that had been enough.”